The present invention relates to the manufacture of individual wound rolls of materials, such as postage stamps, from a web of material, including slitting, winding, sealing and unloading of individual wound rolls to produce a roll of stamps.
In Applicant's copending application, entitled "An Apparatus and Method for Preparing Individual Wound Rolls from a Slitted Web of Material", Ser. No. 07/895,268, Applicant disclosed an apparatus which quickly wound a single roll of stamps from a slitted web of material. While this invention uniquely and advantageously winds the individual rolls, the stamps are left, however, to be manually packaged and manually removed. Manually packaging the stamps is disadvantageous because the wound rolls may unwind during the process. Furthermore, manual performance of these steps is time consuming and costly.
It would be desirable, therefore, to provide an apparatus and method for automatically and efficiently producing wound rolls of single strips of stamps, applying a closure, such as a retaining tape, around the stamps while the stamps are in a tightly wound condition, and removing the stamps quickly, thus allowing the process to begin again quickly and automatically.